Saturday, May 2, 2015

This is gonna be an awkwardly long post because our P-day got moved
to Thursday and thus I have more to write about... :) But it was all worth it
because we got to see ELDER BEDNAR on Tuesday!!!!!!!!!! I've gotten to see Elder
Christofferson and Elder Perry before but I'd never seen Elder Bednar so when he
walked in it was totally a wow moment for me. But I'm getting ahead of myself -
I'll get to the conference in a second!

Monday night: Family Home Evening with Franca, her son Massimiliano, and
Fratello and Sorella Perticaroli. We all had a really good time! We had an
amazing dinner and Fratello Guidara, the Perticaroli's son-in-law, stopped by to
say hi. Gioia Perticaroli was there too with her son, who totally has a crush on
me. He was trying to get my attention the whole night and if I didn't look over
at him he started yelling. Fratello Guidara's daughter Olivia was there too and
she kept telling me that my last name can't be Battezzato, it has to be
Battezzata because I'm a girl. That one was good! I love little kids hahaha.
:)

Tuesday was pretty normal, we had our district meeting and got piadine for
lunch! I was dumb and thought I could eat two instead of one but my brain had
totally underestimated the size and weight of them so I was basically dying
afterwards... But they were SOOO good!!!

Wednesday and Thursday were awesome because we went to Mamma Gigante's
house to help her clean up Ale's room! It sounds goofy but it was actually
really smart of her. She basically is packing away all of Ale's clothes to keep
the dust out of them while she's gone and it'll leave space for guests to put
clothes away if they come visit. And we're totally changing the room - moving
the bed, throwing out old stuff, putting everything in boxes... It was actually
exhausting but fun at the same time. And we fixed Ale's desk with nothing but a
hammer, some screws, and a screwdriver. Pretty fun stuff. :) And then Mamma made
us delicious food afterwards. She's seriously the best!

This week we were able to see Bertina, Rita, Mary, Sara, and Sandro! Here's the update:

Bertina doesn't want to change religions but she knows the Book of Mormon
is true and she loves the things we teach her. Hmm...

Rita says she'll commit to coming to church because she knows she needs
to be baptized. We're working really hard with her! We know she can do it but
she needs an extra push.

Mary doesn't agree with a lot of the stuff we've been teaching her and
she won't read the Book of Mormon so let's see what we can do there...

Sara read a little bit of the Book of Mormon and we read with her when we
visited her! Marta finally told her about her baptism and she said, "Maybe
someday I'll get there too." So we're trying hard to help Sara!!!

Sandro is new. He's from Santo Domingo and he actually was seeing the
missionaries and had accepted the baptismal invite while he was there!!! But
then he moved to Italy and he lost track of the church. So it's an absolute
MIRACLE that we found him and are teaching him now. We're going to bring him a
Book of Mormon in Spanish this weekend. I think it's going to help him a lot
because he's trying to find answers and he wants to be sure that this is the
true Church of Jesus Christ before he joins it. He's very honest with himself.
We're really excited to teach him. :)

Saturday was GREAT because we went to a park for an activity with our
branch! It took us two hours to get there instead of thirty minutes because we
could NOT find the place... Whoops... but we made it! We played games, ate some
barbecue, talked to nonmembers, got even more tan than we were already... Haha!
It was seriously awesome. I have some great pictures to remind me of how much I
love the members here. I feel so lucky and so blessed. :)

Alright, the moment you've all been waiting for: the Bednar conference. Our
mission is getting iPads so he came to talk to us about the new system of doing
missionary work with them. All 200 missionaries in our mission came up to Rome
for it! But getting there was quite the adventure...

We woke up at 4:50 that day. Yep, that's right! It absolutely stunk, I felt
like a walking zombie. We left in the car at 6:00 for Rome, took the highway,
got there at 6:35, waited at the mission office only to find that we had been
told the wrong meeting place so we walked five minutes to the metro station and
met up with a maaassive group of anziani! I had never seen some of them before
but... Anziano Puff was there! We hadn't seen him since January! He's in
Sardegna now. He could not BELIEVE that I'm still serving with Sorella
Margheriti!! It was funny to watch his reaction. :)

The metro was pretty digustingly crowded... And then something ridiculous
happened! Sorella Margheriti got on before me but I had a carry-on with me (we
were going to spend the night in Rome because she had to go to capi conference
and I was gonna stay with the Rome 1 sorelle) and it was blatantly obvious that
there was no room for me. But I had to get on otherwise we'd get separated!
Anziano Busdicker climbed on super quick and tried to hold the door open for me
but all of a sudden it started to close and in a last-minute attempt I jammed my
umbrella in the door and... it stayed there. The doors would NOT open. That was
probably not the smartest thing to do on my part. And then the metro car started
to roll away with my companion still in it AND my umbrella sticking out of it. I
was like WHAT JUST HAPPENED THIS IS INSANE I WANT MY COMPANION AND I WANT MY
UMBRELLA BACK. I wasn't alone at least. I had a bunch of anziani with me and
Anziano Puff was absolutely LAUGHING his head off and Anziano McGuire was trying
to make me feel less guilty for not trying harder to get on and Anziano Molnar
started telling me about one time that he lost his companion and I was just
standing there not really hearing any of it because I was in shock about
temporarily being separated like that from Sorella Margheriti. I felt SO BAD!
Hahaha! In the end I freaked out about absolutely nothing though, in situtations
like that it's okay if you're alone with a bunch of anziani. Oh man. It was
intense. I bolted out of the metro and hugged Sorella Margheriti really tight
after that! My umbrella didn't make it though. Hahahaha (this plays a part in
the story later)

We went to a hotel near the Villa Borghese for the conference. When I
walked in my brain totally overloaded because every missionary in the Rome
mission was there and everywhere I looked was somebody that I hadn't seen in a
long time! It was so strange to see everybody together but it was really nice at
the same time. :) Eventually we were all settled and waited quietly for Elder
Bednar to come in. When he did everybody stood up silently. It was a powerful
moment. And he walked right past where I was! It was crazy to see him in person!
When he started talking I turned to Sorella Margheriti and made a super excited
face because I was actually hearing his voice instead of over a General
Conference broadcast. Like wow. But that was just the beginning! Elder Bednar
had all of us scoot our chairs up to the front, literally right under the stand,
as if it were a fireside! I was less than ten feet away from him!

This is cool though: when he started talking he said, "This is not about
iPads." He looked at all of us for a second and then he asked why we thought he
said that. And turns out he defied all of our expectations about that
conference. He asked us questions and called on volunteers to hear their
opinion. It was so cool. Like a question and answer session! It felt so personal
compared to all the other meetings I've been in on the mission, really. After
our lunch break he asked us if we had any questions and when Anziano Martin
asked him how we can prepare to be good parents. It started a big long discussion
about how we can become better people now and how our obedience on the mission
prepares us for the rest of our lives, all of that. I could go on for hours
about what we talked about but it was just something you can't forget. I felt
the Spirit really strong and I can testify that Elder Bednar is an apostle of
the Lord. I took away a lot of renewed determination to be more obedient and
diligent from that conference. It was really special. :)

Elder Allen and Elder Teixeira were there with their wives. They talked to
us about how the rules and standards for technology use with the iPads are gonna
be and they gave us some new manuals printed by the church with the explanations
and instructions for everything. We'll study them better as a companionship. It
was crazy to see something like that in my hands though! I never thought I'd be
using an iPad to do missionary work on the field. We don't know when we're
getting them but it's clear that the Lord is putting a LOT of trust in the Rome
mission. It's a big responsibility and I feel SO humbled to know that He sent
one of His apostles to speak to us, not about how to use the new technology, but
about how to improve and better ourselves so that we can live the gospel more
fully and thus prepare ourselves for this new responsibility. It was just
really, really awesome.

The walk to Rome 1 was... wet. Sorella Jones and I headed to the church in
Rome 1 with Sorella Puzey (she was in my group coming to the mission field) and
Sorella Roberts, who are both serving in Sicily right now and needed to stay the
night in Rome before going back. They were really sweet :) Anyway, it started
POURING and I got absolutely SOAKED through my clothes and had to stay like that
until I got to the sorelle's apartment at 9. Sorella Vickers and I took a
picture because our makeup was running like crazy and we were sooo so wet!!!
Pretty gross huh! But the Sicilian sorelle and Sorella Jones and I managed to do
some finding in Sorella Jones's area anyway! I got to know them better and we
talked a bit about what we learned from Elder Bednar while we traveled. :)
Sorella Jones made us couscous for dinner and then breakfast burritos the next
day and she lent me a pair of pajamas because ALL the stuff in my suitcase had
gotten wet... including my scriptures. Which, miraculously enough, didn't even
get that wet. SO LUCKY. So yes, I had quite the adventure this week!!

There are a million other things I could say about the conference but time
is short and my poor mother translates everything I write into Italian so I'll
spare her the grief... :)

I am so grateful for all of these experiences that I've been having on my
mission. It's changed me so much for the better and there's still a long road
ahead. I'm ready and I'm excited. Thank you to everyone who has helped me get
this far. I love you all. :)